The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey eBook

“I afterwards learned,” said the deacon,
smiling broadly at the amusing recollection, “that
the three men were those colored players who constitute
the band you young people always have at your barn
dances, Daddy Whitehead, the leader, and his able assistants,
Mose Coffin and Abe Skinner. They really believed
they had met something supernatural in the woods,
when taking a shortcut home, after attending a dance
somewhere out in the country. And, really, I
never had the heart to undeceive the poor ignorant
chaps. But I warrant you they kept to the highway
after that terrible experience with ghosts.”

Hugh laughed at the mental picture of those three
aged musicians, one with his fiddle, another carrying
a ’cello, and the third an oboe, “streaking”
it through the dark woods madly, possessed of a deadly
fear lest their time had come, and that they were pursued
by something from the spirit world.

He was just about to make some remark when the words
froze on his lips. Mrs. Winslow had given vent
to a cry. It thrilled Hugh strangely, as though
he feared some agonizing pain had suddenly gripped
the old lady.

Both he and the deacon were instantly on their feet.
As they glued their eyes on the figure across on
the other side of the broad hearth they saw that she
was sitting there with a marvelous look on her wrinkled
face—­a look that seemed to tell of sheer
amazement, exceeding great joy, incredulity, and many
other like emotions that Hugh could not stop to analyze.

CHAPTER XVII

A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY

“Joel, come to me quickly!” they heard
her gasp, as though she were almost suffocating; and
both of them hastened to her side.

“What has happened, wife?” cried the alarmed
deacon.

“Oh! tell me, am I awake, or dreaming, husband?”
she went on to say thickly. “See what
the child is wearing about his dear chubby neck!
Surely we ought to know that tiny gold locket.
It carries me far back through the long, weary, waiting
years to the day I clasped it about his neck—­my
baby Joel!”

The deacon snatched the object from her quivering
hand. He stared hard at it, as though he, too,
might suspect he were asleep, and that it was all
but a vision of a disordered mind.

Hugh was trembling, he hardly knew why. Something
seemed to rush over him, something that thrilled him
to the core. He had felt a touch of the same
sensation when the good old lady let him look at the
pictures in her family album, and pointed to one of
her baby boy; although at the time he could not fully
grasp the idea that appealed so dimly to his investigating
mind.

Then Deacon Winslow found his voice, though it was
thick and husky when he went on to say hastily:

“Yes, it does look mighty like the one you had
for the boy; and we never found it again, you remember,
after he—­left home; so we thought he had
taken it along with everything else he owned.
But wait, wife, don’t jump at conclusions.
It is next to impossible that this should be the
tiny chain with the plain gold pendant that you bought
for our little Joel. Surely there must have been
many others like it made.”